Software Spotlight

Michael Bernzweig (00:02.494)
Are you ready to unlock the secrets of B2B SaaS success? Tired of sifting through endless noise to find actionable insights that actually move the needle?

Welcome to Software Spotlight, your weekly deep dive into the transformative world of Software-as-a-Service. Your host is Michael Bernzweig, who in 1998 launched Software Oasis as one of the first platforms enabling businesses to download, license, and deploy software instantly across their networks with a single click. Today, Software Oasis has evolved into one of the leading communities where businesses find top tech consultants across the USA and Canada.

Each week, Michael sits down with industry titans, innovative leaders, and game-changing executives to bring you exclusive insights you won't find anywhere else. From emerging technologies to market trends, Software Spotlight delivers the strategic intelligence you need to accelerate your SaaS career and stay ahead of the curve.

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I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Software Spotlight. I am Michael Bernzweig, founder of Software Oasis and the host of the Software Spotlight. Today, we're actually being joined by Michael Buckbee He's the co-founder of Knowatoa. And with that, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Buckbee (00:25.588)
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me here. I'm always delighted to meet another software developer named Michael. So this is good stuff.

Michael Bernzweig (00:29.878)
I love it. love it. And to be honest with you, it's a lot of fun to learn about all of the latest in AI as it's all around us. And it sounds like you're in with both feet and you've had a lot of experience leading up to this. So I was hoping that for our audience that may or not be familiar with either yourself or Noatewa, could you give us a little bit of your career journey getting to where you are now?

and tell us, tell the audience a little bit about Nowa Toa and what it's all about and what it does.

Michael Buckbee (01:06.562)
Yeah. So, I started out as a software developer for most of my professional career and then slowly bounce between startups, larger companies through acquisitions and different, you know, traumatic journeys through corporate America. And, you know, along the way really kind of fell in love with doing software development in the context of marketing and always have felt like that as an undervalued superpower.

Michael Bernzweig (01:23.56)
Sure.

Michael Buckbee (01:35.47)
to be able to do that and, you know, build a career off of doing that. And then eventually, working my way up to where I was the director of DemandGen at a large public cybersecurity company. And after a number of years there, I quit to form my own cybersecurity company. And then as we were doing that, you know, I was talking to some other SaaS founders and we almost as a joke started putting our company names into chat GPT and

everything we found was wrong, know, like listed weird, weird competitors for us and listed, you know, the wrong competitors and the wrong sort of categorizations of what we did. And I couldn't get it out of my head. And so like most software developers woke up the next morning and I wrote a little script just to run on my local Mac that hit open AI's API.

Michael Bernzweig (02:06.965)
Sure.

Michael Buckbee (02:28.934)
and exported out a bunch of data to a CSV file. And I did that for myself and for a bunch of my friends, and then just kept doing that. And then eventually built a website for it and then started getting some SEO agencies in. And that is Knowatoa today. It's a service to handle the brand management and monitoring and rank monitoring in Chad GPT and Gemini and Claude and these other AI search services that are coming out.

Michael Bernzweig (02:55.601)
Interesting, interesting. And it's a very interesting origin story. mean, it sounds like, obviously you had the tech background, but you really were looking for a solution for yourself. that, that's quite honestly, a lot of times we're some of the best, best inventions and best, ideas come from. And, you know, prior to the podcast, I know you had mentioned to me that, that you've had some other,

SaaS businesses that you've founded in the past. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that part of your journey?

Michael Buckbee (03:26.862)
Hmm?

Michael Buckbee (03:32.652)
Sure. So I sort of reflexively make SaaS applications, like probably way too many. And some have been very successful and some have been more like little side projects. One that's turned out to be fairly popular is Send Check It. It was originally like automated QA for emails where I'm sure as a marketer, send out a big email blast and then you get a bunch of responses. Hey, the main call to action link says,

Michael Bernzweig (03:46.527)
Sure.

Michael Buckbee (04:01.71)
put link here, doesn't actually say what it should be. And I think we might have lost you, Michael.

Michael Buckbee (04:13.814)
I'm just gonna wait here until you come back.

Michael Bernzweig (04:24.706)
And with Send Check It, how did that journey go?

Michael Buckbee (04:29.15)
well, ultimately the, the, the core software application of it was more of a nice to have than a burning issue for people. But in the process of it, I built what I call a content engineering tool, which was, an automated checker of subject lines. And so people could go to the site, enter in their subject line and would tell them like, is this good or is this bad? And I made this massive data collection system for it.

where I basically signed up for, I think, several thousand different email newsletters and then did data analysis over all the subject lines and what was good and what was bad. so currently, I looked at the stats today, it's over seven million subject lines that we've checked on behalf of people. And that's not even counting, like there's an API for it. That's seven million that people have like hand entered, not like automated. And so,

Michael Bernzweig (05:14.375)
Wow.

Michael Buckbee (05:27.862)
you know, that's still in my mind, like a system that I own. And, you know, we use that to promote Knowatoa because there's a lot of crossover between email marketing people and people concerned about how they appear in AI search. And at various times I've, you know, put affiliate offers on it and, you know, written an ebook and sold on it and things.

Michael Bernzweig (05:48.711)
Interesting. So, so as far as like the foundation of AI and AI search, and we were at now, you know, in the early days, you know, and even up until now, you know, it seems like so many organizations have been focused on traditional search engines, but, know, just looking at some of the stats, I mean, I can see that annually traditional searches is on the decline and, you know,

Michael Buckbee (05:56.59)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bernzweig (06:17.827)
I started most of my searches, to be quite honest with you, with AI. And I'm sure the whole segment of our world is doing that. And looking at some of the most recent stats, clearly that's the direction. Most of the world is doing an ever increasing start of their journey through AI.

Michael Buckbee (06:25.24)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (06:44.871)
How do you think this whole evolution came to be and where do you think it's heading? What does it mean for business?

Michael Buckbee (06:53.816)
Well, I think it's really interesting that, know, OpenAI didn't set out to make a Google competitor and they happened to. It was almost by accident, you know, despite, you know, there being so many startups that have tried to dethrone Google in lots of different ways over the years. And, you know, someone did it kind of by accident, which I think is a little bit hilarious. And I think, you know, to Google's credit, they have taken the threat of this very seriously.

Michael Bernzweig (06:59.75)
Right.

Michael Buckbee (07:22.962)
And what that means is that they are now the primary AI search service that's out there, even though we don't really talk about them that way, that over a billion people have used AI overviews. Like Google has stated that in their earnings calls. And when you think about it that way, AI search is mainstream. I was at Home Depot and I asked one of the people there a question and they went and looked it up on their computer and then read me the AI overview.

Michael Bernzweig (07:38.118)
Right.

Michael Buckbee (07:51.628)
This is a mainstream technology now, and I feel like the traditional SEO ranking factors and how we consider things and how we build content and strategize about it aren't keeping up with it.

Michael Bernzweig (08:03.207)
So in terms of Google, for example, I mean, if you look at the standalone AI solutions, have ChatGPT. Obviously, Google has their Gemini, Perplexity, which actually started right near me in Boston. You listen to the news, you have DeepSeek, have all of these other, Grok, have all of these other solutions that are just

Michael Buckbee (08:15.127)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Buckbee (08:22.828)
Yeah, cool.

Michael Bernzweig (08:32.471)
springing up all over the place. And some of them are just tremendous in terms of the capabilities. You know, in the early days and even up until now, traditional search, Google owns it. And at the end of the day for these standalone solutions, they're not the market leader. So, you know, the integrated, you know, SGE results that you were talking about, do you think

that's their strategy to maintain some market share or do you think the standalone, I guess I don't even know that's the correct word, but these independent AI search engines, do you think that's the future? What do you think?

Michael Buckbee (09:21.49)
I think the future looks a lot more fractured. like, here's an example, Anthropic, which is the makers of Claude and you know, they're backed by Jeff Bezos at some level and a bunch of other investors. They are probably the second most used AI search tool and not really because of Claude, but because of Amazon. If you go to Amazon, Amazon now has a Rufus e-commerce shopping assistant.

Michael Bernzweig (09:32.368)
Right.

Michael Buckbee (09:49.784)
that's on every homepage of Amazon, every visit to Amazon, you see it every product page it's offering these questions. And that's actually backed by Claude, by Anthropix Claude. And so now a lot of questions that you couldn't type into the search bar at the top of Amazon, you can now get answers for inside of Amazon as a full blown search engine. And it functions as AI, like what's weird about it is you can ask it like, write me a Python Hello World program.

Michael Bernzweig (10:00.571)
Thank

Michael Buckbee (10:18.156)
and it will write you a Python hello world and the little chat widget that's on Amazon's homepage. It will then try to sell you some Python books, but you know, like it's, it, yeah. And I think that type of AI search is just going to suffuse and just be in every app in every place is really what the, the near term future looks like. And for Google, you know, they are already,

Michael Bernzweig (10:26.273)
What you expect there, right?

Michael Buckbee (10:46.904)
trying to move ahead with what they call like AI mode. And again, there's been like definite Android leaks of like what it looks like. And it's a search experience that in their terms is like one surface. Like right now they say we have two search surfaces. We have traditional and we have Gemini and it's a blending of those two. And AI overviews as we see them now are really just the first take at all of that. There's gonna be many more in lots of different ways.

Michael Bernzweig (11:12.231)
Right.

Michael Bernzweig (11:15.655)
Yeah, and I think it opens up the whole question, you know, and I think maybe the launch of DeepSeek brought this to light, but I mean, I think it opens up the whole question when you look at Google at the end of the day, you know, their foundation, their core is built on advertisements, know, paid ads. And, you know, if everybody's starting their search somewhere else, it doesn't leave a heck of a lot of advertising units to display.

Michael Buckbee (11:35.512)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bernzweig (11:44.005)
which is why SGE is important for them. But, you know, not being the market leader in some of these other spaces is going to be concerning for them. I mean, I'll be honest with you, I've been using Perplexity since it first launched. And when I logged in a few days ago, and obviously they consolidate a whole variety of new AI search models, I was shocked to see.

DeepSeek is one of the AI models. And I think for anyone that is concerned with a lot of the privacy concerns with AI, having AI that's hosted in China or somewhere else around the world, I think in that way, a solution like Perplexity.

offers some sort of a buffer or shield for a lot of, a lot of individuals, or if not, at least the, uh, appearance of some sort of buffer or a shield or something on that idea, but even, you know, perplexity themselves, they're starting to experiment with how do we integrate some concept of an ad unit without becoming commercial and having our results look, look very, you know,

commercial or biased in some ways. So I think that's a big question mark as to how do these search engines remain unbiased.

Michael Buckbee (13:21.486)
Well, I think there's a lot of questions of bias. I think there's a lot of questions around sourcing, like how data sources are presented. And I think there's a lot of questions about, you like you talked a lot about how you're using perplexity. I don't know if you've tried, they just a lot announced, sorry, not lunch announced today. They're their version of a deep research tool, which is, you know, all of us are extremely good at like having a business problem.

extracting out some part of that, thinking of what the search query should be, putting it in Google, getting a bunch of results, taking those results back, looking at the top of them, synthesizing them, getting a result, and then going on with our business task and all the deep research tools. They just sort of obliterate that where they started the sort of task level do a hundred, 200 web queries for you, take that information, collate it, and then let you, you know, push it back out.

to something else. Like a good example is I was working with someone and they were trying to plan their wedding. you know, this give me a list of the wedding vendors for the different categories in Virginia Beach where I live. And it goes out and finds all those, makes a list. You click a button and it's a Google sheet. And that is a whole new thing where we have software doing searches on our behalf. We have a lot more.

I think as marketers, have to think a lot more about task intent than previously thinking about just search intent, like what are people trying to do, where with that, we can try to help further down the funnel, like write content, or at the top of it, we can try to offer tools that actually actively help with these tasks.

Michael Bernzweig (15:06.151)
And that opens up a great question that I saw come in from the audience beforehand. So anytime I see a question come in multiple times, I always like to cover it. Can you explore a little bit deeper the whole concept of task intent versus search intent, so that the audience really understands the difference at a deeper level?

Michael Buckbee (15:16.972)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (15:24.76)
Sure.

Michael Buckbee (15:29.314)
Yeah. so

Michael Buckbee (15:34.422)
I think there's a real danger and I see this on both sides. see this search marketers think of AI as like a new search engine, that it's a bunch of these like specialist mini search engines and software developers think of AIs as, you know, generative engines that it, and they almost forget that there's a search part of it. And what's actually out there is that these are advice machines, you know,

We call them like answer engines, but what they're really good about is giving advice. And when people have tasks, they break them down themselves and they try to, you know, take the individual elements of that and put them into searches and get results back. But if it's task-based, it's the starting point is more somewhere with an AI where it's a lot harder to ask.

Well, here's a programming example. You want to write a for loop with JavaScript. Like you can type that in. You can type that into Google. Google has an AI overview that will tell you what it is. Or you can click on the top link, which is the Stack Overflow. And I kid you not, Stack Overflow has 20 different questions about how to write a for loop. So now you have to do this mental.

thing that we all do and we're all really good at, like, which of these 20 questions about for loop should I look at? Then you click on it and there's a hundred comments arguing about it and one thing's upvoted. And then someone says like, this is outdated. Cause you know, or, and that search intent that you're trying to figure out the right way to write this for loop, or you can take the for loop that you wrote and isn't working, paste it directly into chat GPT. And it will just tell you, here's the corrected code.

And that's the difference between task intent and search intent. Your task is, need to fix this. And it works directly on the thing versus search where you have to do these different layers of abstraction and mental modeling.

Michael Bernzweig (17:40.807)
So what is the implication for marketers? I mean, to be honest, what is the implication right there?

Michael Buckbee (17:50.484)
I think so much of the SEO game has been around traffic. And a great example of this is HubSpot. HubSpot's an aspirational brand. They've been a real leader in the content strategy space. They've been, you know, they're awesome. They have made a deliberate move away from these very highly trafficked but low intent articles. An example, they used to have, they used to be one of the number one ranks.

for resume letter. And the search intent there is I need a resume letter, I'm sorry, a resignation letter template. I need a resignation letter template that I can give to my boss to get out of my job. And you would go to their site for that and then they would have a bunch of things you didn't want. They would have, hey, what actually is a resignation letter? And like, we talked to three people and they each said, you know, cause you're trying to do EAT.

you know, they each said, here's what it goes into a resignation letter. And then you click on, download the resignation letter template and it takes you to another page. That's a landing page for them. And then you go through, you know, this like graded form with entering all your information. And then finally they, they email you a PDF. And if you go now to Google and you type in resignation letter, there's an AI overview that is directly the template.

and there's a little button at the bottom that's like, do you want to launch this in Google Docs or do you want to launch this in Gmail? And it is impossible to compete with that. HubSpot has looked at that and said like, we're not going to be able to, we can't add more expertise to this. We can't change the H1s in this. We can't write a better meta description our way to outranking the utility of this AIO. So we're not going to work on it. So right now,

that page on their site is redirecting to one that is amazing, which is all about how they've done this massive content audit. And they've started to pull this off where that content audit article is great because it's from their perspective. Like only HubSpot could have written it. And it's about their team, their massive amount of content, the individual people on it, the considerations, how to actually use HubSpot in this really clever way to handle the categories and stuff.

Michael Buckbee (20:11.904)
It's great. And so they've taken this generic low intent article, gotten rid of it, and now they have this higher intent, better thing that they're moving to. And I think that's what we need to do as an SEO is to think more strategically, build better content, move further down funnel.

Michael Bernzweig (20:32.721)
Yeah, and I think it all comes down to, you know, what is it that you can do as a marketer that adds value to the internet that doesn't exist on the internet, that is unique and provides your own unique perspective. think that really, really hits the nail on the head because at the end of the day, you know, the one thing that AI is fantastic at is synthesizing information that is, you know, obviously it's looking at

the extremes and it's trying to find that midpoint or the truth from everything that's out there. So I think that's really probably one good strategy. I think the other question that I saw come in in so many different angles and so many different ways. So if everything is changing, what are the strategies that we can use to really get

Michael Buckbee (21:06.093)
Hmm.

Michael Bernzweig (21:29.829)
ahead in AI search and still get our brand out there and be visible and relevant in the years to come.

Michael Buckbee (21:40.046)
Sure. So I wrote an article on our site called the Biscuit Framework. And so this is not tied to any specific AI search engine. And it's not tied to us as a service. It's an open framework. And what it really advocates is that, hey, it's early days for this stuff still, like in a lot of ways and different stuff. So what we need to do is do reasonable things to set us up to have a foundation.

for a future and to start doing some of the more strategic pieces. The real specific stuff is you need to check if the AI bots that are indexing the same way Google bot indexes your site, whether they can index your site. And when a lot of the initial AI launches happened, I think there was a great deal of fear and anxiety about this. And so even today, I think out of the top thousand sites, many of them still have robots.txt restrictions of like,

Nope, Chad GPT can't access the site. And I think we're coming to a better understanding of it's more nuanced than that. you know, we made a great piece of gated content. Maybe we don't have Chad GPT or Google index that, but the rest of the site that has like our operating hours and where we work and how to contact us to give us money, those should definitely be, those should definitely be indexed. And that's a change. So that's a reasonable one.

Michael Bernzweig (22:58.961)
They better find us.

Michael Buckbee (23:07.222)
And then with respect to content, I think there's a couple of different areas here. One of which is just brand knowledge. Like something as SEOs we haven't really had to contend with, especially in like the B2B SaaS space, which is where I come from, you know, something someone said to me was, hey, you know, chat GPT right now, it's our most popular and least well-trained customer service representative where everyone is asking questions. Who knows what it's saying.

And so there's a lot of work to be done just to get the basics of like, here's the right brand information about us. The other piece is you want to worry about brand sentiment. Something you can do right now is if you go to chat GPT and you ask it about Wells Fargo, like, Hey, should I bank at Wells Fargo or should I bank at this other bank? Like a straightforward money question. It will.

give some real bad things about Wells Fargo and say like, hey, maybe you should think about their ethics and do an ethical review before you do banking with them. Not a strong recommendation. that's, and you know, that's their overall reputation. And those things influence the overall search in a way it doesn't in traditional search where, you know, if you put Wells Fargo into Google, what you get is a lot more like, here's the closest location. Here's the nearest ATM.

Michael Bernzweig (24:09.383)
Right.

Michael Buckbee (24:30.862)
kind of stuff, here's their, you know, the login to their online banking. You don't get like, oh, they were fined, you know, $243 million for, you know, ripping off their customers. that's that part. And then finally is the actual, like head to head, what is the best kind of queries? Like what is the best email software? What is the best? And you want to have brand statement content that you put out on your site and that you put out onto social and everywhere else.

that backs that up. And so, you know, we're still early in 2025 here. So it's still appropriate to have like, hey, here's the 10 key features that, you know, our customers really liked in 2024 and list those out.

Michael Bernzweig (25:13.233)
So you've obviously taken a deep dive on this and you've spoken with a lot of brands and all of that. What's your gut? Do you think most organizations are, this is even on their radar or do you think not so much at this point, do you think they're still focused on traditional search?

Michael Buckbee (25:19.276)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (25:35.406)
I think most places are still focused on traditional search because they're very traffic focused. And I think that's good. I'm a very data-driven person. I want to see this stuff happen. And I want to see decisions made off of data. But I do think there is a weird thing happening where I talk to a lot of SEOs and different people.

Michael Bernzweig (25:41.691)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (26:03.566)
And almost all of them say to me, oh yeah, I love chat GPT. I use it all day, every day. I don't really think it's going to change the overall market for search. then by the 10th person that's told you some version of that, you start to think like something is weird here. And like a cognitive dissonance of like how things are happening where

Michael Bernzweig (26:21.605)
Yeah, everybody's using it, but nobody's, yeah.

Michael Buckbee (26:26.102)
Well, and I think part of this is how we define search. Like if you look at your Google Analytics, you know, there's a huge chunk of direct. There's also a huge chunk of like, this is Google organic. But of that Google organic half is maybe branded search, you know, the other part is maybe, you know, navigational search. The people are looking for, like they're looking for the login page for your SAS. They're looking for, you know, invoices or something. And then there's a big chunk of informational stuff, which is like,

maybe the super top of funnel stuff. And then there's a wedge that you really, really care about, which is like, Hey, how's their pricing stack up against other people? Like which of these has better features? Like, are they a good company to work with? Like, are they reliable? Like those kinds of high intent questions. And I think there's a disproportionate amount of activity happening around those types of questions in the AI search that is not happening.

in Google because things have been so like over optimized and I don't know if that reflects well so

Michael Bernzweig (27:28.325)
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's interesting. mean, I logged into Ahrefs the other day and they have an entire capability and functionality around AI search, you know, so obviously it's on their radar and obviously they must be getting a lot of people wondering where they stand. So I guess that the flip side of it is how do you see

Michael Buckbee (27:42.286)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bernzweig (27:57.407)
advertising evolving as some of these AI search engines start to mature. mean, obviously right now everybody's fighting for market share and eyeballs and just users. But you you look at something like DeepSeek, I mean, they not only put a solution out fast and cheap, but they also, I think the bigger story there, and you know, obviously you'll hear both sides of that.

thought, I think the bigger story there is how they've been able to generate results with a very low cost of CPU usage and a very low cost of resources, which every other AI search is just focused on how do we build more nuclear power plants so we can power all of these AI servers. And DeepSeek took the exact opposite approach, I think.

Michael Buckbee (28:52.525)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (28:57.48)
looking at some of the stats, mean, it's just a margin of efficiency way, way different than every other AI search that's out there.

Michael Buckbee (29:08.876)
Yeah, I think it's hard to recognize how primitive everything we're doing right now is. And, you know, I mentioned like, I find it really interesting, like how OpenAI sort of made a Google competitor on accident in almost the same way. It's an accident that these AI models can run on all the hardware that we have now, where it's not really optimized for that.

Michael Bernzweig (29:17.264)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (29:26.374)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (29:38.634)
the models are getting more and more efficient over time, you know? because there's all of the, like something we don't consider well is the absolute pricing decrease per like computational unit, if you want to think about it, from even a year and a half ago. If you look at like what people were paying for like 3.5 turbo, which is like now the cheap,

Michael Bernzweig (29:41.34)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (30:08.654)
OpenAI model, it's a thousand X less today than it was a year and a half ago. That's crazy. That's a huge decrease.

Michael Bernzweig (30:12.401)
Right.

Michael Bernzweig (30:17.231)
Yeah, I mean, think if you look at Google, I mean, just even trying to provide traditional search results versus the cost of producing AI results was a big, big factor in how they rolled out their generative results.

Michael Buckbee (30:35.828)
and it's gotten much cheaper. mean, they publish a lot of data about this. And so, you know, I think the future, you know, we're going to see AI models everywhere. Every form fill for everything we do is going to be pushed through an AI because it's going to be, you know, a fraction of a cent too. So if it could possibly make it a little better, you know, that's going to happen. And we're going to have just search everywhere and we're going to have lots of things to, to help with it. think, you know,

My recommendations are that SEO and like search marketing in general, that you start to think a lot more multifunction, that it's not just search, that the content you're recommending is also good for social. It's also good for support. It's also good for sales. And that's a way to kind of close some of the value gap around this. And I think it's going to be more more important to have content that has a face to it.

that has a definite point of view because everything that's not that is going to be sucked into an AI and answered there.

Michael Bernzweig (31:41.083)
Yeah, interesting. And I know you've also talked about the concept of content engineering. And I guess one of the question marks I think a lot of people have is, how would you differentiate content engineering from traditional content marketing? And why is it important?

Michael Buckbee (31:48.364)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (32:00.974)
Sure. I think tools in general fit in a different place in people's minds than blog posts. Just as like a general statement where they're much more likely to use them. They're much more likely to put them into their processes. They're much more likely to recommend them. And again, if you look at HubSpot as a leading brand, what's in their footer now is a bunch of free tools, you know, evaluate the potential of AI search impact on your site.

You want to write a better email subject line? Do you want to like, you know, grade an article for, you know, how, for its clarity and, know, at what level it's written. They have free tools for all of that. We have a free tool that does like active checking of your site. If it, you know, is, is blocking any of the AI bots, send check it that we mentioned earlier is a free tool.

There's nothing SendCheckit does that you couldn't do if you read a blog post and then meticulously went through each of the 12 points that it checks. Or you could paste the subject line in and it gives you a grade and says, fix these three things. And you're like, yeah, that would be better. And you make those little changes.

Michael Bernzweig (33:08.679)
So for any marketers who are kind of ahead of the curve and really trying to keep up with everything that's going on, and I know that's one of the things we try to dive into on this podcast, for anyone using Knowatoa today, what are the core functions that they can accomplish? And can you kind of contrast that with where you see things heading with the solution in the months and years to come in terms of...

Michael Buckbee (33:19.907)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (33:23.383)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (33:37.243)
what a marketer will be able to do with the solution with the information they have now versus where it's heading to.

Michael Buckbee (33:46.84)
Sure. So I mentioned, I think things are going to get more fragmented and that definitely seems like a trend. It is a lot of work already to stay on top of like Google search console and just all the issues that can crop up in there. Are you being indexed properly? What's happening? We have an AI search console that is starting to take over, you know, some of that because there is no way to like submit your site to chat GPT. There is no way to submit your site to Claude.

So we're doing a lot of that implicitly. We're trying to make sure these things work. And like I said, we check that against 25 different potential bots that are out there that do different things for your site. And we have a lot of customers that have come out of that where they've checked their site and they say like, okay, Google bot can reach us, but Google extended, which is Google's bot that does the data gathering for Gemini. That is then what ends up in AI overviews that was blocked for them. They didn't realize it, you know,

It wasn't in the robots.txt, but they were happened to be using CloudFlare. Someone got ambitious and clicked the, I'm going to block AI bots checkbox in CloudFlare. And they had a bunch of indexing issues. And then to help with, like right now, if you put your domain in, what we do is we look up the top thousand keywords that your site ranks for in traditional search. And we help sort through that to find.

where are these high-intent keywords, and then see where you rank against competitors, and to pull those out and show you that in a real visual way that is something you can communicate to your CMO, that, hey, we're on this. Here's where we stand now. Here's where we can build content against. And the best teams that we're working with, we see really reflect those answers back into their content. So I had mentioned best email service provider.

That's a query that's pretty competitive. And if we look at what the answer was in ChatGPT 3.5, it was a list of 10 companies. And in 4.0, the latest, like what's reflected in ChatGPT, if you typed it in right now, what comes out is here's each of the companies, here's the group they're best for, this one's best for enterprise, this one's best for e-commerce, and then here's the key features and maybe even pricing. And it's already broken that all down for you. And so,

Michael Buckbee (36:11.362)
The companies are taking that and they're going, well, we were focused on small business. We need to put out a lot more that we're working towards enterprise. You know, we did have those features. We actually want to mention these other ones and to reflect that back. And they're seeing results from this. Like I think another concern people have is that because it is such a black box now, there's no way to influence it, but a hundred percent for sure. There are ways to mess this up.

Like you can make this much harder on yourself if you block all these bots, you can make this much harder on yourself if you don't directly answer these type of like brand statement questions about why you're good, about the problems you solve.

Michael Bernzweig (36:48.207)
Yeah, so and it's interesting what you said there. So it's it is possible to understand and to analyze where you're at. It's possible to take action on that information. It's not at this point possible to quote unquote submit to these different A.I. search engines or search bots. Interesting. And do you think that might be coming? Do you think?

Michael Buckbee (36:59.745)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Buckbee (37:08.514)
Hmm.

Michael Buckbee (37:12.397)
Yeah.

Michael Buckbee (37:16.622)
I think eventually, yes, but also I think things have, this is going to be radical. I think things have changed in the last two decades and I don't know if all the tools that Google has established make a hundred percent sense to pull forward into the world of AI search. And Google has been more more reticent to share data about how many people are searching for keywords. And there's all sorts of

Michael Bernzweig (37:17.957)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (37:24.764)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (37:36.165)
Yeah. And then I...

Michael Bernzweig (37:42.169)
Thank

Michael Buckbee (37:45.59)
caveats to even like your GSC data where if you apply any filter to it it suddenly becomes sample the numbers are always off so I I don't know but

Michael Bernzweig (37:47.644)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bernzweig (37:57.317)
Yeah, and I guess the other question is how will advertising evolve in the age of AI? think that's an interesting question. There's more questions than answers, I think, at this point, and it's interesting.

Michael Buckbee (38:09.932)
Yeah. Well, I think from the side of like search, search advertising, I think we're looking at a world where web search for B2B SaaS companies, online brands, e-commerce stuff looks a lot more like some of the other Google properties, like Google local and Google like shopping where they are much less website based almost.

and a lot more pay to play and a lot more in-house Google data that you have to submit and keep track of and jump through all these hoops to make happen and immensely, immensely profitable for Google.

Michael Bernzweig (38:52.039)
Well, you can tell from my haircut and I can tell by your knowledge and experience. You know, we both remember when the internet first launched. mean, obviously it mid nineties, I think right around 95, 94, 95, 96 when it came out of the universities and when mainstream. And I think that was a big paradigm shift in our world. And I think, you know, AI, which was early machine learning,

Michael Buckbee (39:17.218)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (39:21.735)
and is now flourishing as AI is really that next paradigm shift. And, the next thing that I see on the horizon that I think is, gonna change, the trajectory of everything that's going on right now is AI as it relates to low code and no code tools. think there are just a tremendous number of organizations out there in SAS that, feel as if they're, they're, you know, code and all of that is really a moat.

Michael Buckbee (39:41.41)
Thanks.

Michael Bernzweig (39:51.723)
And I think at the end of the day, one of the things that I'm saying is, your branding is your moat, but I think as AI is making it easier and easier to launch solutions, I think it needs to be something more than just the code. So I think that's interesting. But in the space that you're in, what do you see as kind of like the next, you know,

trajectory in terms of things that are exciting you that you see coming along.

Michael Buckbee (40:27.682)
So I'm actually quite a big fan of AI assisted coding and like you mentioned, the low code tools. I think those are tremendous for doing content engineering pieces where you can imagine like a calculator is sort of like the base level sort of content engineering thing. That's a great thing to get out of low code, no code solution. And we've experimented like I've made some like Chrome extensions for particular tasks like

and then successful at like generating those with like no code input. So I think there's a lot of opportunity that comes out of that where, yeah, well, and also like even right now, if you're thinking about this, I think it's one version of this is you think of this like, a free tool that's like this big thing on the site, it's gonna be engineering, it's gonna be months of work. It could be a couple of days, it could be, you know, it could be a...

Michael Bernzweig (41:05.936)
we're super early, yeah.

Michael Buckbee (41:27.294)
radically different resource allocation than what you're thinking. And that opens up lot of possibilities.

Michael Bernzweig (41:29.254)
Right.

Michael Bernzweig (41:33.191)
So if you were to kind of bullet point the action items for anybody listening to this podcast in terms of what they need to do to prepare for what's coming in terms of getting from where they are from an SEO standpoint to where they need to be, what would be high on your list versus something that's a little further out?

Michael Buckbee (41:59.084)
Yeah, I think the easiest thing to do, make sure the bots can index your site, make some good decisions around what you do and don't want indexed. Start to think about your content. Start to think about making some more like brand statement content, brand knowledge. Try some of these queries out yourself, you know, in chat, GBT and Claude, and then think about distribution, distributing them beyond your own site, distribute them to LinkedIn and YouTube and as many different places.

as you can because right now I think the only real ranking factor in AI search is really repetition and the more you can do that the better off you're going to be.

Michael Bernzweig (42:38.607)
I love it. Well, I really appreciate you taking the deep dive with us today and very interesting episode. And I know I'll be honest with you of all the episodes that we've had over the past bit, you know, everything related to AI is exciting, but this this really generated a lot of interest. So I think that that's really neat. So anyways, Michael Buckby from Noah Toa, we're going to leave obviously a link in the show notes, we're going to get

Michael Buckbee (42:44.598)
of course.

Michael Buckbee (43:00.661)
good. Awesome.

Michael Bernzweig (43:08.527)
and get the episode of overall of our channel so everybody can listen to it. And really appreciate you joining us on the Software Spotlight today. For anybody that's not subscribed, obviously you can subscribe to the Software Spotlight on your favorite podcast player. We also have two sister podcasts, the Career Spotlight and the Consulting Spotlight. So be sure to check those out.

And we also have a weekly newsletter that goes out. You can subscribe at softwareoasis.com backslash subscribe. Nothing too fancy there. And once again, Michael Buckbee with Knowatoa. Thanks for joining us today.

Michael Buckbee (43:50.922)
Awesome. Thank you so much.